


What Comes Next

by alicewritesthings



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Depression, Grief/Mourning, Morgan Stark is Screwed Up, Pepper Potts Is Doing Her Best, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-02-09 14:51:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18640336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alicewritesthings/pseuds/alicewritesthings
Summary: Morgan Stark grows up in a world post-Endgame, and the world reacts to her as the heir.SPOILER ALERT: the world reacts poorly





	1. In Which There's a Funeral and a Child With an Excellent Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone! Welcome to my post-Endgame fic!  
> I had been planning a fic very similar to this for a few months, and then when I saw Endgame I was like NOW I MUST WRITE THIS NOW  
> The new post-Endgame version honestly makes more sense, and I've got some excellent angst coming up. The only problem is that for obvious reasons (SPOILER ALERT) there's a lot less Tony in this one than in the first idea :(  
> There's plenty of plot coming up; this is set-up time.  
> Anyway, hope you enjoy!

The flowers drifted away so slowly, as if they could sense that the soul they carried should not be leaving.

In the woods along the edge of the pond, the crowd in black was silent and still, watching that movement. Funny, that the memorial was this quiet. Tony Stark had rarely gotten that type of peace in his life, but he hadn’t really held it inside himself, either. His best moments had always been grand and desperately necessary.

Somehow, though, this moment made more sense than the spectacle the world had created outside these woods. Sure, Stark had woven chaos into miracles. Sure, he had taken the most razor-thin chances, the worst blends of danger, and walked through them into a new light. But what he deserved now was not more glory. He had plenty of glory.

Now, he would get that quiet.

 

After the funeral, the flowers halted in the center of the pond, spinning in lazy circles. If you weren’t looking closely, you might have missed them. The crowd dispersed along the bank, a series of private moments lined up together. Each person looked out at the water and thought something different.

Steve Rogers, leaning against a tree, thought of the trust which Tony had never stopped deserving. Maybe he had been wrong, but he had still been worthy of trust.

Carol Danvers, stone-faced on the porch, worried about the planet’s security without the icon of Stark’s intellect warding off attackers. The man was a legend far beyond his own galaxy.

And many eyes turned to Morgan Stark, kicking her legs on the porch swing. It was hard to tell what the girl was thinking. 

She was funny and sharp and overly present for her age, but you couldn’t tell what her mind was really like quite yet. Maybe she was the next Tony, the world’s next beacon of brilliance. Or maybe she was just a four-year-old who was going to grow up without a father.

“Anything you need,” said Steven Strange, grasping Pepper’s hands as he moved out. “Or anything she needs. Just say the word.” Pepper nodded, lips pursed. Morgan rocked back and forth. She might have been listening, or she might have been somewhere else entirely.

 

After the Avengers trickled out in a string of condolences, Pepper stayed on the porch with Morgan in her lap. The flowers had started to sink, but they weren’t yet gone completely.

“Are you in charge now?” Morgan asked, playing with her mother’s hair.

“Yeah, the company’s mine,” Pepper stroked the top of Morgan’s head. “Everyone offered me help, though, and I think I’ll take it from some of them.”

“You should,” said Morgan. “It’s good to get help.” 

She was quiet for a moment before looking up. “Can I look at Daddy’s lab? Will you tell me about the things he made?”

“You can look at all of it,” Pepper said after a surprised moment. “I might have someone else do the tour, though. I’m good at running the company, but I’ve never understood the inventions.”

Morgan nodded and looked out the water just in time to see the flowers finally tip below the waves. A feeling like crying built up in her chest, but she only cried at night. The world was big and strange without her father in it. He had been the center, and now everything spun funny, not knowing what came next.

She had heard the grown-ups saying strange things about alternate realities, and she thought she would have preferred a different one.

 

“So, he used those to make repairs to his current suits,” Peter said. He caught a glimpse of the trademark red metal and dug his fingers into his palms. The girl beside him was curious and focused, and she was four years old. He couldn’t be a wreck just now.

“And then these are projections of the things he was working on.” He swept a finger along the edge of the table, and a hologram appeared above it. “I guess-I guess he never finished this one. It looks like an upgrade to the blasters on the suit.”

There was a notification at the corner of the table-a note added to the project. Peter stared at it for a long moment before pressing it.

“Alright, F.R.I.D.A.Y., it looks like I have to stop working on this and try to solve time travel now, so let’s just bookmark what I’m doing.”

Peter pressed a hand to his mouth. At the door to the room, Pepper stumbled out and then back in a moment later. Morgan glared up at the hologram, her whole body focused on listening.

“When I made the nanotech suit, I was able to up the intensity of the blasts, but it means a shit ton of nanobots concentrated in my hands. That’s not really a problem, though. Honestly, it’s not a problem at all. I don’t even know why I’m trying to improve it. I guess I like the puzzles that don’t have such high stakes attached.

“Anyway, time for a puzzle with the highest fucking stakes I’ve ever worked with. That’s great. I just wanted to remember that I’m looking for a different pattern to arrange them in so I can use fewer in the hands. Not that it matters.”

A sigh echoed through the lab. “ _ Fuck  _ time travel.” And the recording went silent.

After a moment, Pepper started laughing from the doorway. Peter almost did too.

Morgan was smiling for the first time in several days, but she was still staring up at the hologram with a laserlike focus. “F.R.I.D.A.Y., can you zoom in so I can see the pattern?” she asked.

“Of course.” The hologram zoomed in on a tiny point, until the tessellation of nanobots was visible. Peter had seen the blueprints for the new suit, and this was much denser. The energy would bounce off of bot after bot, compounding until it finally blazed out.

Morgan studied the pattern for a moment before tapping a single bot. “Copy this,” she said. “I want to try something else.”

She could only reach the outermost edge of the hologram, so the new pattern appeared in a corner of the blue light. Every time she placed one, she stared at it, making minute adjustments with her tiny fingers. Finally, she stepped back. “Run a simulation on that.”

In slow motion, blue light began to bounce from bot to bot. Where before it went from side to side, now it was fully sent backwards a few times, only to go forwards again. Sometimes a beam would hit one corner of a bot and then hit the other side several steps later.

Once the beam had completed its course, statistics began to stream out. They were several feet above Morgan’s head, so Peter silently lifted her up. Together they watched as the numbers appeared.

“Cool!” Morgan said as they saw that the intensity was the same. “Save that pattern.” She hopped down onto the floor. “Oh, and copy the audio file from that note to the main section.”

She ran across the room to Pepper. “Mom, did you hear that? It was Dad!”

“I heard, sweetie.” Pepper picked Morgan up. “Later, I’ll look and see if there are any more of those.” She raised her eyebrows at Peter and left the room.

Peter paced back and forth. “F.R.I.D.A.Y.?”

“Yes, Peter?”

“That was fast, right?”

“Mr. Stark may have done it that quickly, but nobody else would have.”

 


	2. In Which Morgan Stark Wears a Blazer and Yells at her Mother

**FIFTEEN YEARS LATER**

Pepper looked up sharply from the porch swing as she began to hear an engine roaring. The sound wasn’t odd, but the time of day was.

“Can’t you tell her to drive slower?” Happy asked, coming out of the house to watch as the car tore down the driveway.

“You know I can’t,” Pepper said. The car screeched in, the visual so familiar it made Pepper’s throat close up. “I did make sure she only did it here.”

She stood and walked to the railing, looking down as the car door opened. “Why are you home so early?” she called.

Morgan Stark, red lips pursed below black sunglasses, slammed the car door. She wore striped pants and Doc Martens and one of her father’s old jackets. “It was a waste of time,” she told her mother as she walked towards the porch.

“Why?” Pepper asked. “I thought you liked this one.”

“I usually do,” Morgan said with a shrug, coming to stand in front of her mother. She was shorter and stockier, her light brown hair shaggy around her shoulders. She pulled her sunglasses off. Up close, Pepper could tell instantly that something was off. Morgan’s state of mind was often precarious, teetering between gleeful and stubborn and angry, but something had genuinely rattled her today.

“What happened?” Pepper asked.

Morgan began to walk away, giving Happy a cursory smile as she passed him. At the door she stopped, and after a moment she turned back.

“It’s about the processes and motivations of great inventors, and today was about Dad.” She slammed the sliding door.

Pepper sputtered as Morgan vanished into the house. Happy sighed. “Why does she even take those classes? I know they’re ridiculously easy for her.”

“I have no idea.” Pepper sighed, sitting back down. “She’s got this whole justification about how it’s good practice, or it gets her to focus on things she wouldn’t naturally, but I honestly don’t know why she doesn’t just leave and go to a competitive school. The colleges in driving distance from this house aren’t really at her level.”

“She likes the free time, I think,” Happy said. “Focusing on her own stuff. Do you know what she works on in the lab?” 

“Nope.” Pepper raised her eyebrows. “I’m not allowed in the lab anymore.” 

“She won’t let you in?” Happy asked.

Pepper agreed. “I don’t really care about not going in the lab; I never really did anyway. And besides the lab and the clothes, I have everything else of his. But she just… grabbed it. I know she didn’t think about me.”

Morgan Stark slammed her backpack down on her desk, the noise deep and satisfying. She sighed and rubbed her eyes. When she brought her hands back, there were smudges of black eyeliner on her palms.

A minute later, she had changed into Stark Industries sweatpants and a sweatshirt. Her father’s jacket and T-shirt were hung neatly in her closet, but she flung the pants and boots into a pile at the bottom. For a moment she considered going down to the lab, but she didn’t really feel like fiddling with holograms, creating a pointless exercise to solve. She only rarely had that much motivation.

Morgan knew that she confused Pepper and Happy, and Peter and the rest of them as well. The Stark mind looked strange when it was stubborn and lazy and wholly lacking ambition. She just didn’t care about that either. The thought of being in truly rigorous classes, of being forced to constantly improve herself, just made her tired.

And besides, every engineering or robotics class she had ever enrolled in had at least one period exploring the creations of one Tony Stark. Pepper didn’t know that Morgan skipped class every time her father was mentioned, because most of the time Morgan would just drive around for a few hours to calm down before coming home as if everything was fine.

Today, though-today had been different. Her class this semester wasn’t about science; it was about the way the greats had approached science, what they had cared about and what their motivations had led them to.

“Tony Stark believed that with wealth and intelligence came a responsibility to save the lives of as many people as that wealth and intelligence possibly could.”

Morgan hadn’t heard a word beyond that. She had started stuffing her things into her bag as soon as the first picture-the one with the medal, the classic-had come up. By the time the screen changed, she was almost out the door, but she had still caught a glimpse of the second: a blurry security camera screencap, taken long before she was born and in a distant nation. Her father, skinny and terrified, hooked up to a car battery, methodically saving himself-and the world-under the nose of terrorists.

That was plenty. She had nearly thrown up on her way to the car.

Instead of going downstairs and absently fiddling through tech, she sat at her desk and pulled a book from the top drawer. She could constantly feel the energy humming from it. Stephen had only let her borrow it with the spell on it, which protected it from harm and let him instantly call it back when he needed to. 

Morgan had no command over the forces the doctor commanded, and she knew that learning that type of thing wasn’t something that intelligence and a pedigree that was impossible to be worthy of qualified you for. Flipping through the book had no real purpose. It was just what she did when her mind went dark.

_ Infinite timelines exist, splintering off from infinite points. _

Maybe some teens thought about suicide. Morgan thought about alternate realities.

She had grown up with infinite love and privilege around her; the world had been very kind. But her mind was sticky and violent and brutal to her and others, and yet she was the only one who carried her father forward. At eighteen years old, she sat in her bedroom in this same house, contemplating other existences over and over and over. She was less skilled than her father at eighteen; she had taken no steps towards an active role in the company. When Peter stopped by now, he joked with her about math and heroism just like he used to, but the look in his eyes as he left was filled with pity and frustration.

Nothing had changed since she was young. It was clearer and clearer every day that Morgan was in the wrong timeline. 

 


	3. In Which The Starks (and Peter) Eat Dinner

A few days later, Morgan and Peter were eating dinner together, and it neatly straddled the edge between familial comfort and awkwardness.

Peter was fairly certain that Morgan didn’t like him, and he wasn’t always certain that he liked her. There were moments when she was kind and sharp and present and quite possibly his favorite person alive, but more often than not she was sullen and rude. She rarely smiled when he arrived, and her manners were cursory at best.

He still liked these dinners, because he loved being in this house, but usually he and Pepper and Happy ended up talking and Morgan ended up sitting like a boulder between them. Even when it was just the two of them, she was that immovable. He was comfortable enough that he didn’t feel pressure to force conversation, but he didn’t exactly enjoy being alone with her. 

Pepper burst in the door after twenty minutes. She kicked her heels off and grabbed a slice.

` “What kept you late?” Peter asked.

“One second,” Pepper said around a mouthful. Something was off enough about her tone that even Morgan looked up.

Pepper finished eating and sighed. “I finally secured control of the company.”

“That’s amazing!” said Peter. The government, worried about the power of Stark Industries in new hands, had been fighting Pepper for months.

“Was it because Dad picked you before?” Morgan asked.

“Mostly,” said Pepper. “But it doesn’t matter. They’ve stopped fighting me, which is great, but now they have a new problem.”

She bit her lip and looked at Morgan, who stared back for a second before slamming her palm on the table.

“I know,” Pepper said quickly. “Believe me, I argued against it.”

Morgan stood up, and the sight of true fear in her eyes was strange and disconcerting. “So they could just… take it from me? Appoint someone else to succeed you?”

“Or they could take it over themselves,” Peter said grimly, and Pepper nodded.

After a moment, Morgan pushed her plate away. “What do they want me to do?”

“Argue for yourself,” said Pepper. “Make a case that you’re worthy of it.”

Morgan snorted. “Well, that’s a waste of time.” Before Pepper and Peter could retort, she had walked out.

She threw herself into a rolling chair in the lab and started tinkering with tiny pieces, mindlessly fitting them together. After only a few minutes, the half-finished object was dropped back onto a desk to be forgotten. What was the point?

For a while, she was frozen in the chair, but eventually she wheeled herself over to a computer and logged in. Her files were all carefully guarded, inaccessible to anyone else, but the one hidden behind the most layers of code wasn’t blueprints or ideas. It was a series of audio files. Morgan clicked on one.

“Today, we begin building a suit for Pepper. I should have done this years ago.” A laugh. “So now the three people that matter most to me all have suits. Well, had. I don’t know.” It was quiet for a moment. “Anyway, I’m not sure if she’s actually going to like this, but it’ll be fun to have a project focused on her. I don’t think I could focus on anything else anyway, because-”

A different voice cut into the recording. “Daddy?”

The first voice sighed. “Oh, God. I don’t even want to be here; I don’t want to build anything, I just want to do that-”

Morgan paused the recording and leaned back, scarcely able to breathe.

There were recordings from many eras, but she mostly listened to the ones from the years when she was alive, when Tony wasn’t working much at all. They didn’t make her feel quite as bad about herself. Sure, it had been her that had made him not want to innovate, and she had absolutely no reason, but he had once not wanted to work. They had been the  _ same  _ at one point. Right?

She felt sick. The thought of the company looming over her was horrifying.

Pepper knocked on the side of the door. “Morgan, can I come in?”

“Sure,” said Morgan, head in her hands.

“I want you to do this,” Pepper said, sitting down across from Morgan. Her eyes were serious.

“I know you do,” Morgan muttered. “But I don’t have the base of work they want, and I don’t have Dad’s charisma, so what’s the-”

“Morgan, you have his mind.” Pepper grabbed her daughter’s hand. “I know it, Peter knows it, everyone who’s ever taken a class with you knows it. I think they’d be happier with you at the helm than with me.”

“Well, what if I don’t want it?” Morgan burst out. “What if I don’t want that pressure? What if I wasn’t built for it?”

“That’s another story,” Pepper said slowly. “You don’t have to take it if you don’t want to. I just… I thought you would. You are built for it.”

“How would you possibly know that? It’s not like I’ve ever taken any interest in what you do.”

“It’s not your focus. Tony certainly needed to be pushed into focusing on any of the logistics. You’ve been bettering yourself by inventing and studying. I assumed those things just took up your time.”

“No.” Morgan’s eyes were waves crashing onto rocks. “I have plenty of time. I could have learned, but I haven’t done a fucking thing.”

“In that case, I’d like to know why. Do you not think it’s important?”

“Of course it’s important!” Morgan yelled. She stood up, hands clenched on the edge of the desk. “It’s the most important thing in the world, but I still can’t make myself care about it!” 

 


	4. In Which Many People Realize Something Kind of Obvious

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone!  
> Content warning: this chapter goes more in-depth into a character's experience of mental illness, as well as treatment of it.
> 
> If there's anything I got really wrong in this chapter, PLEASE let me know. I drew on some research, my weirdly complete background in social work for a teenager, and my personal experiences with situational depression. However, I don't suffer from the illness that my character does, and I definitely could have made mistakes in the portrayal. If I did write something that's wrong or damaging, I would love to know so I can name it and fix it.

“What?” Pepper asked softly.

“I can’t make myself care about it,” Morgan repeated, low and guttural. “I try to tell myself that my skills matter, that I need to think about the world, but I can’t even get myself to care whether the government takes the company or not.” She fell back into her chair and looked at her mother with angry, stubborn hopelessness.

 

Pepper was silent for a moment, breathing heavily. She stared at her daughter, who was angry and unstable and desperate- _ desperate.  _ Desperate to care, to be the force in the world that she was supposed to be.

At that final battle all those years ago, Pepper had come down from the sky unsteady and untethered, and over years she had built herself back up. Grief never really ended, but she was solid now; she was usually content, sometimes happy, and she felt grounded in her work and in those around her. It had been a long, arduous trip from cavernous space to a solid point.

Morgan had gone the other way. And Pepper, enveloped in her own changes enough to expect strange emotional changes from others, hadn’t noticed the whole story until now.

 

“Morgan, I think that could change. I think you need help.”

“What, the fact that my moral compass doesn’t work?” Morgan threw a hand up. “Sure.”

“No, the fact that you’re trying to care about something and can’t.” Pepper looked Morgan in the eyes. “The fact that you can’t hear mentions of your father in public without panicking. The fact that you’re cold with everyone who cares about you.”

“I get it, I’m a terrible person. I know, Mom. I know.”

“No,” said Pepper. “There’s something going on in your mind. I’m so sorry I didn’t figure it out sooner.” Morgan opened her mouth slightly and looked back, not responding. Eventually, Pepper spoke again. “If I were to make you an appointment with a therapist, would you go?”

Morgan shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me. But you’re not gonna get an heir out of it.”

“No, I think you are.”

 

“Do you eat around the same amount every day?”

Morgan laughed. “Not even a little bit.”

“And if you forget to eat for a while, how hungry do you get?”

“I’m almost never hungry.” Morgan leaned back in the chair. Her legs were draped over the side. She felt sensitive and vulnerable and seen all at once. It was strange to talk about herself for an hour. Most of the time, she tried to ignore herself.

“So,” she asked, raising her eyebrows, “was my mom right? Or is it just me?”

“I’d say your mom was right,” the therapist said.

Morgan blinked. 

 

When she got home with a promise to come back, she went up to her room and started Googling things.

Pepper was home, Morgan thought, but she didn’t appear. Early that evening, Morgan heard the front door opening and quiet voices. Then footsteps led up to her room, and suddenly Peter was gently pushing the door open. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.” Morgan waved a hand. “I assume my mom told you about the stuff today.”

Peter nodded. “How was-”

“She wanted you to judge how ready I was to talk about it?” Morgan asked, and Peter nodded.

Morgan sighed. She raised her head and yelled at the door: “THEY SAID YOU WERE RIGHT!”

“They said she was right,” she continued, turning back to Peter.

“If you don’t mind me asking… what?” he asked.

“I’m depressed,” Morgan said with a smirk, her voice strangely thin. “And not even reaction-to-my-father-dying depressed, apparently.”

“That’s… a good thing to know,” Peter said after a moment. He wondered how he hadn’t known before.

Morgan dropped her head back. She sighed, and her body shook.

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

 

Over the next few days, things looked almost the same. Morgan tore out of the driveway for her late morning classes and sat through their painfully simple ideas. When she got home, she went straight to her room or the lab, where she could be found sitting aimlessly in a desk chair, some strange object fidgeting in her hands, staring at a wall or the ceiling.

Inside, she had gone deeper and stiller. The world at large was still far away and grating, but there was a profound feeling within her: a chasm. A war.

She came to dinner and started to eat, but when Pepper asked if she wanted to talk about the things she had found, she looked up like the idea didn’t make her angry.

“I owe you an apology,” Pepper said. “More than one. I should have realized years ago that something was going on.”

Morgan shrugged. “Well, I was sure it was just me.”

“Do you believe it? That it’s not you?”

It took a while for Morgan to reply to that. “I’ve been angry at myself for a really long time-because of everything I’m not living up to,” she said. “So I really haven’t been trying to understand what I’m feeling at all. I guess that’s why things have changed so fast-I was trying really hard not to notice anything. But I’ve been paying a little more attention lately, and… I don’t know, I can sometimes feel the difference. There’s a part that cares and a part that doesn’t.”

“What are your next steps?” Pepper asked. “Are you going to keep seeing them?”

“Yeah, twice a week. I’ve got a whole list of things I’m supposed to try to do in between, like with food and sleep and stuff. Maybe a medication, too, although we haven’t decided yet.”

“Good,” Pepper said. “I bet things will be different.”

“Yeah.” Morgan sat for a moment. “That’s really what made you realize? What I said about the company?”

“After Tony died, I went to therapy for a while,” Pepper said after a pause. “It was a really hard time, and I thought I might be depressed, but we realized that it wasn’t anything beyond grief from everything that had happened. Depression isn’t so connected to events. It just gets in the way of them. So when you said there was something blocking you from what you felt like you should be feeling, it did make me realize.”

“Were you ever mad at me?” Morgan asked suddenly. “Did you feel like I was failing as heir or whatever?”

“I was sometimes frustrated,” Pepper said slowly. “You would talk about how boring and easy your classes were, but you never tried to find something more interesting, and I didn’t understand why. As for the heir thing… I never assumed you would be heir. You don’t have to take that on unless you really want to. There are just moments when you seem really suited to the role, and those moments started when you were around three, so I didn’t get your ambivalence about the whole thing. Now your reactions to all that stuff make sense.”

Morgan pursed her lips. “Did you ever wonder how  _ this  _ came from him?”

“You only knew him when he was older,” Pepper said. “You never saw him before.”

“I know, I know the stories.” Morgan shook her head. “But he took over so early, and he built himself into the most powerful man in the world-even before the suit, he did that. How did you look at me doing nothing?”

“You never saw him before,” Pepper said again. “Morgan, I was with him as he became a good man. Even after that, he didn’t have it together for a while. You only got the best part.”

“But he always cared about that,” Morgan argued.

“Sure, he always cared about that,” Pepper agreed. “But he didn’t always care about everything. He didn’t always take care of himself. He didn’t always care about the world.”

“I have a question for you,” she said suddenly. “If S.H.I.E.L.D. or Carol or somebody came and told you that they needed you to help save the world, would you go?”

“I doubt I would be useful, but yeah,” Morgan said.

“Exactly,” Pepper said. “I think there might have been a time where his answer to that wasn’t instant. And regardless, he was rejected as an Avenger at first. Even when he was willing to do it, he wasn’t in any shape to be useful at first-or at least, he didn’t think he was. You’re already a step past that, my girl.”

Morgan shook her head and smiled. “Okay.”

“Do you believe me?” Pepper asked.

“No,” Morgan scoffed. “But okay.”

She pulled her chair away and walked out. Her hands felt cold and a little light, the things they were touching oddly far away. With every step, the feeling grew. She wasn’t zoning it out any more, so it was easy to tell as it slowly spread. The room around her zoomed out like a different dimension.

This bubble was familiar. This bubble was common, and the book about alternate realities was the only thing that was fully present in it. Any other day, she would have grabbed that book and spent hours retracing passages she already had memorized, pretending it was more real than the things around her. 

Today, she saw that coming. With an effort that made her nauseous, she turned around and walked back down the stairs and into the kitchen. Pepper had started to clear the plates away. Morgan walked straight up to her and wrapped her arms around her without a word.

Pepper returned the gesture automatically. “Are you ok?”

“Clearly, no,” Morgan said.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Pepper asked.

“No,” Morgan said, stepping away. Her breath shuddered. She had never tried to stop herself from entering that distant void, and she was exhausted from a minute of it.

“I’m trying,” she told Pepper, and actually left.

Upstairs, the book lay neglected in her desk drawer. Morgan scrolled through Instagram for a while, motionless under her covers, and then just turned the light off.

The next morning, she woke up bleary-eyed well before her alarm, and after a dull moment of pause, she opened her laptop and began writing a script for herself.

 


End file.
